A South Florida High School Class will go through two days of hands on automation and security training with Matthew Luallen and the CybatiWorks kit, and then 12 of the students and their teacher will come to the Main Stage on Thursday to discuss the experience. They will hang around at lunchtime if you want to meet and talk to them.

Matthew Luallen deserves big thanks for first putting together the CybatiWorks kit and program, second working with the school we connected him with in Palm Beach, and third volunteering his time to perform the training. Digital Bond is purchasing six of the CybatiWorks kits for the course and will donate them to the high school after S4.

Our hope is that some of the S4x17 audience will be inspired by this and look for ways to improve on this effort and potentially develop something that is scalable. One of the larger challenges is if something like this is successful, meaning students learn from it and get excited about doing more of this type of learning and work, how do you make something like this available to 1,000 students? 1,000 students in each state? It’s more than just raising the money to buy the kits. It’s training and supporting the teachers. Developing courseware and likely a host of other items.

Marc Blackmer of Cisco, a Cabana Session Sponsor, is giving another important and related talk on the Sponsor Stage entitled: Mentoring for Fun and Non-Profit. He will talk about his experience in creating 1NTERRUPT, a free, non-profit cyber security program for students ages 14-22 that emphasizes creativity, community, and meritocracy. 1NTERRUPT is based in Worcester, MA, and now has chapters in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Portland.

I came across the following article on the Security Bytes blog. The article is regarding initiatives aimed at finding “Americans with the skills to fill the ranks of cybersecurity practitioners, researchers, and warriors.” There are three major aspects of this initiative.

First, a competition aimed at High School students (only available in Rhode Island) with an interest in Computer Science. Secondly, the Cyber Foundations 2011 National Competition focuses on three major areas (Networking, Operating Systems, and System Administration) where material is provided by SANs and individuals or teams compete in three events to demonstrate mastery of the above subjects. Lastly, the Department of Defense is also sponsoring a Digital Forensics competition for High School, Undergrads, and Graduate students. You can go to the US Cyber Challenge website for more information on the above subjects and other information such as training camps and treasure hunts.

I think that this is a great initiative that we in the cybersecurity community should support and find ways of expanding its programs to other states. In the past Dale pointed to “Little sense of community, peers, and training” as one reason for why we do not capitalize our security talent’s skills to their fullest. This would be an excellent way to change the current dynamic of spend years taking training, doing grunt work, and then getting more responsibility after that. It gives the students motivation to learn early and should help guide them to focus on cybersecurity in college. We should find ways to promote these events at the local levels in each of our communities because it will pay dividends in the years to come.

Dale's Tweets

About Us

Digital Bond was founded in 1998 and performed our first control system security assessment in the year 2000. Over the last sixteen years we have helped many asset owners and vendors improve the security and reliability of their ICS, and our S4 events are an opportunity for technical experts and thought leaders to connect and move the ICS community forward.